The Suicide of Claire Bishop

by Carmiel Banasky

  THE SUICIDE OF

  CLAIRE BISHOP

  THE SUICIDE OF

  CLAIRE BISHOP

  A NOVEL

  CARMIEL BANASKY

  5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd.

  Ann Arbor, MI 48103

  www.dzancbooks.org

  THE SUICIDE OF CLAIRE BISHOP

  Copyright © 2015, text by Carmiel Banasky

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Dzanc Books, 5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48103.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Banasky, Carmiel.

  The suicide of Claire Bishop / Carmiel Banasky.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-938103-08-7

  1. Young women—Fiction. 2. Suicide—Fiction. 3. Schizophrenics—Fiction. 4. Mentally ill—Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3602.A63514S85 2015

  813’.6—dc23

  2015000623

  Published 2015 by Dzanc Books

  ISBN: 978-1-938103087

  First edition: September 2015

  Interior design by Michelle Dotter

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  THE SUICIDE OF

  CLAIRE BISHOP

  Things not yet happened are already here!

  I feel that. They’re just out there:

  a murmuring mass outside the barrier.

  They can only slip in one by one. They want to slip in. Why? They do one by one. I am the turnstile.

  —Tomas Tranströmer, “Guard Duty”

  On the surface of the table his index finger, as though it were a pencil, moved back and forth across the shiny Formica with the insistent gesture of drawing. His eyes no longer appeared to focus upon any particular object, but rather to see beyond the present place and time. Through his finger as it moved, his entire being seemed to flow from him into the ideal void where reality, untouched and unknown, is always waiting to be discovered.

  —James Lord, A Giacometti Portrait

  PART I: THE ESCAPE 1959

  1.

  Claire could not look at herself. She was not allowed. The artist had forbade it, touching the top of Claire’s hand with her own.

  “Not until it’s finished.”

  And it nearly was. The portrait was on the easel in the corner of the den, covered only in a purple, velvet drape cleverly propped out two inches so as not to touch the wet canvas. Claire stood in the center of the room, facing the back of the easel, tapping her fingers on her leg as if counting the seconds until she could look. The portrait had been Freddie’s idea of a gift for her thirty-fifth birthday. She’d hated him for it, until the painter arrived that first day.

  Now the painter was in the kitchen, cleaning her brushes. Most nights the artist concealed the painting by knotting the gold-fringed drape tightly to the bottom of the easel. Tonight it hung loose. It was childish, this great pulse toward the painting. Come look at me, look at me. Not tomorrow or in ten minutes but now. It was a giddy desire. Desire for the forbidden, yes, but it was more than that. There was a secret in it, the way trees held secrets or the rusting fire escapes in the alleyways she rushed passed on Bleeker. The gleaming drape beckoned—just as the young painter always seemed to, though Claire must be mistaken about that: what could the girl possibly want with her? But Claire was a woman of restraint, respect for rules and boundaries. She would not look. She would look.

  She circled the easel, circled it twice—a tiger. She glanced out the French doors into the hallway. She whispered the artist’s name to herself once: Nicolette. Something inside her could have pirouetted out of control.

  She held the gold fringe of the drape. She lifted.

  Nicolette entered with a fistful of brushes. Baby oil dripped from the bristles, greased her fingertips.

  Claire dropped the drape, having seen nothing. Was she disappointed? Only, perhaps, at being caught. She wouldn’t want Nicolette to think her disrespectful. She knelt on the blue drop cloth below the easel, straightening it, looking busy. She billowed the pale blue sheet and it swelled with air. Her own private ocean.

  “I think I’ll head to the roof for a smoke before I go,” the painter said, smiling down at Claire.

  Claire, on all fours in her wool pencil skirt, looked over her shoulder. Nicolette held the light from the hall like a shawl draped across her arms. It was how light should work on a woman. She was beautiful, but she held herself protectively under that smile, as if no one had ever told her so.

  Claire, certainly, was not going to be the one to break the news. She rose hurriedly, her wool skirt sticking to her stockings. “I’ll come with you.”

  Claire hastened the artist down the hall, past the vintage settee they weren’t allowed to sit on and from which Nicolette grabbed the coat she’d thrown across it. Claire was terribly embarrassed of her wealth under Nicolette’s gaze—the native masks on the wall, from her and Freddie’s brief vacation to Cuba years ago, the glass case in the den full of priceless Italian porcelain clowns. Claire had the urge to throw the whole lot of them out the window. Nicolette, with her tight black pants and cropped dark hair—she could have been one of the Village Beatniks squatting in the next building over who always glowered at Claire as though she didn’t belong a toe below Thirty-Fourth Street. They knew, the all did, that she and Freddie had the means to live anywhere in the city—moving to the West Village had been an experiment to indulge Claire.

  On the roof, the water tower hung in the dusk air above them, a suspended animal skeleton. A zebra, Claire decided. She’d only seen a zebra once, in Cuba, in someone’s yard. She sometimes found she missed that zebra. By the time she’d pointed it out to Freddie, it had disappeared—he’d called her crazy and hadn’t believed her. Just as well, she’d thought then, the zebra is mine.

  The rusted iron hummed and swayed in the breeze. Claire had the sudden impulse to tell Nicolette about the zebra. Nicolette would believe her.

  “To tell the truth, I don’t smoke,” Claire said. “Freddie hates it.”

  The artist was busy rolling her own cigarette on the ledge, shaking loose tobacco from a small pouch like a regular dockworker, trying not to lose it in the wind. “What Freddie doesn’t know,” Nicolette said. She licked the paper, handed the finished product to Claire, and lit it for her. Her hand grazed Claire’s cheek. Nicolette smelled dangerous. They stood close together, facing north, peering over to the street nine stories below, sharing the cigarette. Rebellious. But the wind stole her smoke so quickly, it was as if she’d let nothing out.

  “I was up there last week. Uptown,” Nicolette said, gesturing north toward the high-rises, “doing a portrait of this blubber-man. I was up on his roof, smoking, when I realized—I was in the view, I didn’t have a view.” Nicolette held Claire’s gaze. “Not here though,” she said. “Here I have the perfect view.”

  “I love it up here.” Claire averted her eyes, blushing. “It makes up for everything else.”

  “Even Freddie?”

  What a question to ask! She should be furious. Why was she not furious? “I wouldn’t have this view without him.”

  The wind grew louder than their voices. It hit Claire’s ears rhythmically, beat her clean like a rug.

  “I don’t know why,” Nicolette said loudly, “but I used to imagine all the skyscrapers were ladies waiting to go dancing.” She laughed into the wind.

  “I like that,” Claire said. “Ladies waiting forever.”

  The last of the setting sun charged off the west side of the buildings and they le
t it blind them.

  “Don’t you want children, Claire? Since that whatever disease isn’t hereditary. It’s terrible when the smart ones don’t.”

  It was a wonder, the information Nicolette had extracted from her during their sessions. In order to paint Claire, Nicolette had said she had to know her. There were people Claire had known for years who knew nothing about her parents or her childhood. But to this perfect stranger, Claire had found herself describing her grandmother’s operatic voice, the disease Claire once believed she’d inherit, the grounds of the asylum. There was something thrilling about the interrogation. No one had ever demanded Claire talk about herself. And yet the conversation had felt natural, or at least as natural as posing for a portrait; both were made of the same intimacy. She’d let Nicolette crack into her like a crab shell.

  And in return, Nicolette had listened. The artist had closed her eyes and listened. She’d seemed, almost, to swoon.

  But Claire wasn’t posing on the couch anymore. “Why don’t you have children then?” Claire said in answer.

  In the settling dark, it seemed Nicolette was pushing something over to her with her eyes, but Claire didn’t know what, or how to receive it. Then the painter looked away.

  “It’s getting late,” she said. “I’m expected.”

  Who would be expecting Nicolette? Did she simply want to leave? But it was none of her business. Nicolette was hired as a painter, not a confidante.

  Claire nodded. “I think I’ll stay up here a while.”

  Nicolette shrugged and turned to go. As she was about to exit through the large metal door, the superintendent, Tomasz, appeared in the lit threshold. Claire saw him turn and watch Nicolette’s backside as he held the door for her. Striding across the tar rooftop, Tomasz tipped his hat at Claire, or perhaps he was only holding it against the wind. She pocketed Nicolette’s matches, left on the ledge.

  “Mrs. Bishop.” His Polish accent was curt. He winked as he shook a cigarette from his pack of Golds.

  She felt he’d caught her in some illicit act. She blushed crimson as she always did in his presence; it was out of her control. On more than one occasion she’d sensed Tomasz watching her. When she was above him in the stairwell once, she swore she caught him looking up her skirt. It was shameless, but she didn’t mind; she was still doing something right.

  Months ago, when Freddie was away on business, the shower had started leaking from the valve. She’d called Tomasz to take a look, thanking him profusely. Both of them angled together in the cramped powder room, but when he’d tested it, the shower no longer leaked. “I tried it myself before you came,” Claire insisted. He said there were easier ways to get him up to her apartment. The nerve. She’d demanded he leave immediately and had been too embarrassed to ask him for anything since.

  His match went out with the wind. She hated him for his shoulders, his handsome face. She tried to hide her red cheeks with her hair. She would tell him proudly that she could not stay to chat, that she must retire early to prepare for yet another day of sitting for her portrait.

  Instead, she pointed uptown. “I sometimes imagine the skyscrapers are ladies waiting to go dancing. Isn’t that silly?”

  She laughed and looked away, afraid he’d catch the lie. Then she struck one of Nicolette’s matches and cupped her hands around his, nearly singeing his fingers. Tomasz held her eyes, nodding to the beat of the wind. “What stiff ladies,” he said.

  She laughed as if she cared. Her stomach hurt.

  Claire tried to go about her evening as usual. She fed the cat, made herself a martini, dusted the breakfront, polished her silver and fork collection. She tried reading from an art history book she’d checked out of the library for Nicolette’s benefit, but knew she’d nod off if she read another page.

  She tried to push the painting, unlocked, untied, from her mind. But then she found herself sitting again on the couch in the den, as if still posing, facing the back of the draped canvas, and beside it, the blank wall above the mantel where it would hang. Claire tipped back the last of her drink and was feeling terribly light. Had she forgotten to eat supper again? Freddie was dining out, as he often did, with a colleague from work. Or someone. That woman from work. Claire worried he might be meeting Nicolette. It was a stupid worry, she knew, and yet she wouldn’t be surprised. But Nicolette had such a queer nose. Freddie could never love a girl with such a queer nose. And even if he could, Nicolette didn’t seem keen on him, or any man. Claire, however, could appreciate the queerness of the nose. It was exotic. Ethnic, even.

  Claire steadied herself and edged toward the painting. She tiptoed to the front of it, where Nicolette had sat for three days, staring at her. Could she have left it untied on purpose?

  On that first day, as Claire sat rigid on the couch, she had asked Nicolette what, exactly, she was doing with her charcoal fragments and sketch board. Nicolette replied that she wanted Claire’s face in her muscle memory, so her likeness would become subconscious. The idea was outlandish, until it was not. To be memorized, to be known like that, had made Claire feel skittish and elated, dizzy.

  She smoothed out her skirt. She wanted to see herself like that too, to know herself.

  Claire lifted the drape.

  There Claire was, and wasn’t. Her body was severed across the canvas. Severed and repeated. Repeated and mutilated. A woman, and the body of a woman. Claire at every moment of her life: a young girl, then elderly, then her current self with dirty blond waves done up in rollers—all unmistakably Claire. Claire falling from a bridge.

  It was a portrait of a dead woman. Nicolette had killed her.

  She pressed her fingers to the windowpane. Three floors below, children were running between lampposts just lit, a stray dog barking madly at them, though Claire could only see the barking, not hear it. They shuffled around an old man who stood very still in the middle of the sidewalk. An umbrella spidered out of the bushes beside him. The man looked at it, and she at the man, and the treetops in Washington Square moved to a breeze she could not feel. She swayed with them. She leaned on the wall behind her for support. The floor swayed like some long forgotten ocean wave. She felt seasick. She dug her fingernails into the palm of her hand until it throbbed.

  When she returned her gaze to the canvas, it hadn’t changed.

  It was not a portrait, but it was of Claire. There was Claire, fixed to canvas many times over. Claire falling. Again, Claire falling. Claire falling from a bridge.

  It was not nice to look at. It was almost ugly. Or maybe it was beautiful. Avant-garde. Maybe she wasn’t smart enough to understand. Freddie had told her as much. That was years ago at the gallery opening of a friend of his—she’d embarrassed him, saying loudly, drunkenly, how awful the paintings were. Like children’s drawings, she’d said. The artist had as little taste in color as he did in propriety. It simply wasn’t her cup of tea.

  But this was another matter. So what if it was art? Claire was smart enough to know that a person should not paint this instead of a portrait when commissioned to paint a portrait. This was something else. It was Claire falling from the Brooklyn Bridge. It was Claire dead on the street below, her very own street—not the East River, but the cobblestones of Sullivan. What did that mean? Who was Nicolette to paint her this way? Whatever it was Nicolette had seen in Claire was obviously a mistake. Nicolette was mistaken.

  Claire slammed her body into the wall behind her. She was made of rubber.

  She wanted, with a sudden and foreign fury, to hit herself.

  2.

  When Nicolette had asked Claire to talk about herself during their sessions, Claire had spoken about her father.

  Ernest Gabelmacher stepped off a dewy boat named the Susquehanna in June 1922. It was the wettest crossing in a decade, or that’s what the captain, who’d taken a liking to Ernest, had told him portside on their one dry stargazing night. Ernest was likable in any language and was aware of this fact, but that did not mean the captain could help him find a job;
it was not a good century to be German in America. But, the captain reminded him, there were steps one could take. “Soon you won’t be so German.”

  Ernest had ten thousand Papiermark to his name—five thousand in his pocket, five thousand sewn into his suit. This, he learned his first night in Albany, rounded out to just over two dollars. He arrived in time to hear Warren G. Harding deliver the first ever presidential radio transmission. In a deli, customers gathered around a homemade crystal receiver. Ernest pretended his English was solid enough to understand, applauding when the others did, jeering when they jeered.

  This was also the day Ernest met Elsa, the girl working the counter. A transplant herself, she could spot one of her own a mile away. She laughed loudly. “You cannot understand one word,” she said to him in English fringed with a southeastern German accent. The other men turned to Ernest and play-punched him in the gut. Ernest had no choice but to burst out into the only English song he knew: “Toot, Toot, Tootsie,” beginning to end, making Elsa out to be the liar.

  Elsa was seven months pregnant before Ernest had scrounged up enough money to rent a room in a farmhouse in Ovid, New York, a small town proud both of its working-class bent and newly built theater with a quaking chandelier. The owners of the farmhouse were off on fishing boats most of the year, and Ernest promised Elsa that someday the whole house would belong to them, maybe even the whole street.

  Later, Ernest would tell Claire these stories while she did her arithmetic on scraps of wallpaper in the evenings. She knew his life by heart. But it was difficult for Claire to speak to Nicolette about her mother. Elsa was always closed and private, and Claire never thought of her outside of the confines of Claire’s own life, with brief cameos in her father’s. Elsa seemed not to exist until Claire was born.

  For most of Claire’s school years, Ernest was out of a job because of one war and then another. He took work as a traveling salesman—trousers door to door—and as a talc worker until it proved poisonous and he watched his friends die. He couldn’t serve in the military with his talc-weakened lungs, and no one would hire him once tensions in Europe rose. He was naturalized, and all of his savings went to war bonds to prove his loyalty. They changed their name from Gabelmacher to Gabler. But none of it helped or hid his accent at job interviews, and the dream of the house, and the street, evaporated in the night. Elsa took the reins and found work as a silent seamstress, playing mute so no one would know she was German. When she came home each evening from the small factory, she would yell just to hear her own voice.